[Jeremiah Belt]

Thanks for the info. Sadly it’s looking more and more like my 2007 Mac Pro is to dated for a Resolve setup and I may have to upgrade. Much to soon if you ask me. Running my monitors off of the second slot…a 4x slot…with an injected driver to run a GTX285 in the main slot…doesn’t sound promising for GUI graphics performance, Maya, and After Effects work. Hmmm. May be selling my workstation.

[Jeremiah Belt]

Hi Luke,

Thanks for your response and information. I look forward to reading that guide you speak of. And I understand the many facets and complexities of testing this and that hardware layout. Thanks for taking the time to respond and I’m excited to see DaVinci Resolve for Mac in action and all the future possibilities of that workflow. I have no problem upgrading my workstation if required, just wanted to get a feel for what was possible with my existing investments. Even with the price of a new workstation the DaVinci Resolve for Mac is surly a huge price drop, and as a freelance Colorist I am very excited.

Best Regards,
Jeremiah

[Jeremiah Belt]

Ok frankly your getting carried away there Joseph. I am a DaVinci trained colorist and professional. My training was done with DaVinci Systems in Florida on 2K Plus systems and at that time the beta version of Resolve running on a massive Linux cluster. This was well before Black Magic ever stepped into the picture. I by no means am a consumer level pee-on trying to make a DI suite out of an “iPad and Mac Mini” like Arnie put it.

I am running a very well equipped 2007 Mac Pro with 8 3.0Ghz Intel processors, a ton of RAM, over 3TB of online RAID storage, a Kona 3 with Digital SDI out to a calibrated Pro JVC Digital SDI Broadcast monitor (CRT none of this inferior LCD crap), a 30″ Apple Cinema Display, a 24″ secondary monitor, client calibrated monitoring, all running on APC powered backups. I plan to build a full DI theater shortly with a Christie 2K projector, heavily utilizing Cine-tal’s CineSpace color management and calibration software. I had planned on jumping ship and moving to a full Scratch system before the official announcement of the Mac version of Resolve that anyone could of seen coming with the purchase of DaVinci by Blackmagic. I am quite serious with what I do. I have finished many works up to a rez of uncompressed 2K. My work has played at many festivals including the International Santa Barbara film festival and soon possibly Sundance. I am under no dillusions of working on a large budget “Avatar II” feature, but talking about finally moving back to the system and quality of DaVinci that I love…All to better the quality of my work for my clients.

I am simply trying to find a way to leverage my 16K investment for a few more years. Aside from the chipset and CPU versions, the only real difference that may even matter between the current 2009 Mac Pro’s and a 2007 is the change from PCIe 1.0 to 2.0. However performance tests have shown that most video cards don’t even begin to tap the bandwidth of PCIe 2.0. There is nothing “inferior” about a 2007 Mac Pro that doesn’t allow it to run a GTX 285 video card other then the forced driver exclusion by Apple. In a PC workstation the GTX 285 would sing in a PCIe 1.0 slot without any compatibility problems. It’s just forced obsolescence by greedy Apple. A simple driver modification “injection” is all it takes to have the GTX285 running on any MacPro at full speed utilizing Apples drivers.

The DaVinci Resolve heavily utilizes the CUDA processing workflow through Nvidia GPUs. The slight cache and speed differences of the 2009 Nehalem processors wont matter in the Resloves processing. The heavy lifting realtime Linux suites simply tap into clusters of rackmounted GPUs. So in discussing things like the Tesla and external PCI express racks, I’m simply looking for a way to emulate that GPU clustering. An external array of GTX285s if utilized by the CUDA processing of the Mac DaVinci Resolve would be a huge boost in speed. Not to mention, with the proper RAID, begin to approach the Linux cluster performance for a fraction of the cost. All the demos of the Mac version of the DaVinci Resolve were running GTX285 cards.

If I must upgrade my workstation I will. But one cannot be faulted for looking for the best, logical upgrade path to better utilize a current asset. I understand where your coming from…I know many people with the mindset you speak of…however I am not one of them.

[Jeremiah Belt]

Thanks for your response Luke. I think in my case I have figured out the card slot issues so I can still utilize an external RAID for 2K-4K work. However I would like to ask if you could clear up some technical questions. Do you indeed need to have 2 video cards in the system…one for your monitors and one for the CUDA computations of Resolve? I plan to utilize both a GTX285 and a 8800GT, would that be enough power? I would like to just utilize one if I could. Sadly Apple ditches it’s customers far to quickly and I will be forced to run a PC version of the GTX 285 with some injected code that will enable full support of the card in my first gen Intel Mac Pro Dual Quad as long as I utilize a mac compatible 8800GT card to assist. The performance and CUDA benchmarks with this modded setup look very good and promising. With the injected code it utilizes the proper Mac drivers for the GTX285. Much cheaper then buying a whole new Mac Pro just for PCIe 2.0 support, which I doubt the GTX even fully uses. Hopefully some of your ideas for the slot issues utilize some sort of PCIe expander like Simon mentioned. I also think a budget friendly version of something like Nvidia’s Quadro Plex or maybe even the Tesla cards with support for the Mac platform would be a huge boost in performance for DaVinci Resolve on Mac. I’m sure you probably utilize similar tech for the Linux versions. Also does the Resolve auto detect and utilize all CUDA capable video cards attached to a system? Because the use of an expansion rack like this one… https://www.magma.com/expressbox4.html…with 4 more video cards in it would be an amazing performance boost then! Thanks for your time and I hope you can clear up some of these technical questions. There is very little info on the Black Magic site and DaVinci site front end.

[Jeremiah Belt]

I hear ya for sure. I think I have it figured out in my case and it should fit….barely. 2 Video cards, AJA Kona 3, and Raid Card. I’m assuming the RED R3d support will at least be better then Apple Color’s. I have been fine with Apple Color’s support….edit with the RED medium proxies in a 720P timeline, send to Color which will then auto recognize the R3Ds and allow for the conform and color correction up to whatever resolution you like with full exposure control of the R3Ds. Then render, which has been very reasonable on my system, and send back to Final Cut Pro. No pre-transcoding of the RED data at all. That process used to be only half/high debayer but with the latest version of everything it is supposedly Full debayer now. The only down side is the lack of noise control, but I have discovered several tools that solve that problem for me. I think you can skip the RED Rocket in my opinion. If Color can work as quickly as it does with the above workflow I’m sure Resolve will be far better.

[Jeremiah Belt]

I have heard rumor that the DaVinci Resolve on Mac will require 2 video cards? Is this the case or can you run with just a single GTX 285 running multiple monitors and the Resolve CUDA computations? Would it help to add a 8800GT to the mix with the GTX 285 and still run your monitors off the GTX 285 for better all around gfx performance in other apps? My system currently doesn’t support the GTX 285 as it is a Mac Pro 2,1….however I have discovered that you can install a PC based GTX 285 in the primary slot with an 8800GT assisting in the next slot. Then through a injection process of some code have a fully working 8800GT and GTX 285. The CUDA performance benchmarks on that setup look really promising. I’m hoping I can use this method to not be forced to upgrade my 2007 Mac Pro Octo (8 3Ghz CPUs). Either way it would be nice to only have to run one video card and not use up another slot.

[Jeremiah Belt]

Discovered the problem! I uninstalled my Kona 3 drivers, codec, and software. Once they were re-installed all was well again. Duly noted.

[Jeremiah Belt]

Nope, all files play perfect in everything else but look like this in After Effects. I’m starting to think there was a recent update to Final Cut that maybe screwed with some codecs and now is making my good old CS3 After Effects freak. Or it’s a ploy from Adobe to make me buy CS5 shortly. hehe The odd thing is that even opening commercials that were rendered in Uncompressed 10bit from Final Cut a year ago, and that were actually built in After Effects, do the same distorted thing. I re-installed both After Effects, Premiere Pro, and Encore last night instead of wiping the whole suite out. Didn’t fix a thing. I’m at a complete loss. So now everytime I need to get footage into my comp I have to convert it to a ProRes format…and not every format works twice! It’s really annoying.

[Jeremiah Belt]

I’m starting to wonder if CS3 is just to old. I have the latest version of Snow Leopard and Final Cut Studio 3 fully updated. Is this a incompatibility?

[Jeremiah Belt]

To Clarify…basically any Uncompressed export from Final Cut opens like the above when imported into After Effects. Please Help!!?